ART TODAY - MIXED MESSAGES IN A SPACE AGE BOTTLE

Warning: The following article is a strongly polemical opinion piece. It assumes familiarity with art history and proposes a certain position on what art is, can and should be. Readers afflicted by relativism and subjectivism and who have occasional allergies to modernism should perhaps take half a valium as a precaution.Egon Schiele once said “Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal”. We can augment this iconic statement with one less momentous but paradoxically apposite for considering the situation that contemporary art and artists find themselves in today – “All art is contemporary art”*. After all, all art is created in the present day, life, environment, experience of the artist and primarily for his contemporaries. Indeed, art has been a constant and loyal companion of humanity and civilization for hundreds of thousands of years. And yet we find that the work of today’s artists is in a unique predicament, almost universally, of not being understood or accepted by the vast majority of its contemporaries, outside the narrow world of collectors, aficionados and professionals.It has become all too easy and predictable for the art community to point the finger at Duchamp’s The Fountain as the point at which artists parted company with broad audiences, and to shrug their shoulders with feigned nonchalance. This however is a counterproductive oversimplification, which does not provide us with any constructive solutions as to how we can, as indeed we must, reunite.To understand where, why and how we have parted company we need to re-visit and reconsider the history of art from the perspective of the audience. ...Read More at: http://www.introducingart.com/ISSUE%203/Conceive/Mixed%20Messages.html